Holland Festival
If after only the first 15 minutes, half of the middle row flees the auditorium, and you look at your watch, thinking, my god we still have over five hours to go, there is something thoroughly wrong with the performance. 'Shéda', by Congolese playwright Dieudonné Niangouna, is an insane tub of chaos of incoherent tirades. Declaimed screaming at a stretch by 12 hyperactive African and European actors, each with a fixed character, returning as gods to apocalyptic worlds, à la Mad Max, beating each other up with bizarre lyrics. Goodness, it is impossible to make sense of it all. Yet it continues to fascinate. Why?
Niangouna previously made a big impression at the Avignon Festival with his monologues 'Attitude Clando' (2007) and 'Les Ineptides Volantes' (2009). This year he was more intensely involved in the festival as artiste associé, and it was during this working period that 'Shéda' was created. Presumably Niangouna was given carte blanche to go all out this time, unleashing his textual virtuosity (Classical French, poetic French and the African Lari language) on a larger production.
That went a bit wrong. There is absolutely no line in this performance. And don't try to find one either. There is no honour in that.
Inside the Stadsschouwburg is a structure of pallets, scaffolding, steel pipes, ropes, a basin of water and a drainpipe that serves as a slide. Everything is covered in yellow dust and occasionally wet by a sprinkler system. It is reminiscent of a run-down, excavated and looted mine in the Congo jungle. The 12 players, including Niangouna himself, and two musicians move through the havoc. They debate, fight, dance, sing and lose themselves in idiotic tirades, circular arguments, absurdist monologues, Dadaist nonsense poetry, bastardised stories with references to Oedipus Rex and frothy pleas. What it is about is often completely unclear.
This goes on for 5.5 hours. With a break (during which the bar is open!)
But still I stayed put. Because every now and then, in this vast vat of chaos, a gem pops up. Short monologues, hidden here and there between a lot of irritating stuff, that are incredibly funny, sharp and disruptive in a pleasant way. Perhaps not coincidentally, these are often precisely the monologues Niangouna himself holds. Like his transsexual, gay whore variation on the plot of Oedipus Rex, or a hysterical argument that Africa - and really the whole world - suffers from only two diseases: underdevelopment and the electric chair. Explaining this reasoning here is impossible. I made an attempt and completely lost the thread.
Or another repetitive passage, this time played not by Niangouna, but by a joker-like character in a priest's suit: that basically everything, but áll of it, is African. In a serene tone, he declares a list of utensils, food, ideas and all sorts of other things. While the rest of the players high up from the scaffold seem to choke one by one, vomiting poisonous green soup across the playing floor.
Pierre Lambla and Armel Malonga's music - electric bass, percussion, samples - incidentally provides pleasant footing in this otherwise totally disorganised performance.
Towards the end, after yet another fight and fuck, chase through the auditorium, shamanic rain dance and ranting dialogue, Niangouna steps into the spotlight, into the middle of the playing floor and stabs off one more time with a piece of poetry. While his fellow actors try to don meaningless T-shirts - which fails. A nice image; the uniformity doesn't suit them.
But why on earth does this have to take 5.5 hours?
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